Financial institutions and other merchants use telemarketing to market and distribute products and services. Telemarketing can involve the telemarketer calling customers directly to market a product (“out-bound telemarketing”), and it can also involve receiving calls from customers in response to an offer or overture previously received by the customer (“in-bound telemarketing” or “IBTM”), or for other reasons the customer initiates a call to the seller. The present invention is generally directed to handling in-bound telemarketing calls when a consumer responds to a targeted offer directed specifically at the consumer (“solicited offer”) or a generalized marketing overture to a plurality of individuals (“unsolicited offer”). While other merchants, products, and offerees are contemplated herein, a typical scenario involves a bank telemarketing a financial product such as a credit card or credit card-related product or service to an existing bank customer or a plurality of existing bank customers, or to a potential bank customer or plurality of potential bank customers.
It is known that solicited offers are offers which can be sent by mail, the Internet, or by out-bound telemarketing whereby a bank customer is offered a product such as a credit card. The solicited offer will usually include identifying information such as a solicitation number, an offer number, and a toll free number for the consumer to respond. Multiple offers may be extended over time to the same consumer recipient, and typically the bank maintains a database that stores solicitation numbers, offer numbers, and underlying data related to that offer, such as the consumer's name, address, etc. The database may store information that was used in extending that offer, such as any credit data, income data, and household data. Thus, looking up a solicitation number for consumer A responding to offer 1 may provide underlying information related to that offer 1. The solicitation number typically identifies the offer and solicited customer.
For solicited offers, when a caller responds by calling the bank's toll free number, the call is typically routed to a Voice Response Unit (VRU). The VRU may solicit the caller to input data, including the solicitation number and/or offer number. The VRU then accesses the internal offer database to acquire the information associated with the solicitation number, particularly the data associated with the specific offer at issue. Then the VRU issues a query to a third party credit bureau. The credit bureau applies credit decisioning rules previously supplied by the bank. The credit bureau returns an “approved” or “declined” response to the VRU. Typically, the VRU does not give the caller an immediate yes/no answer; rather, the call is then routed to a live agent. Equipped with the limited information from the VRU, the live agent denies the customer's request or approves the request and enrolls the customer in the offered financial program, product, or service. In the prior art, the live agent typically receives limited customer and transaction information from the VRU. As a result, prior art approaches to handling solicited offer responses require a significant amount of time for the live agent to collect data from the caller.
Unsolicited offers are not directed to individual consumers. While they typically include a toll free number, they do not have solicitation numbers or offer numbers. Thus, the process after initial information is collected from the caller follows the process described above, except that there is no database lookup. Instead, the approval information is determined based entirely on information received from the customer during the call.
Deficiencies exist in the conventional approaches for call processing for solicited and unsolicited offers. In both types of telemarketing, the systems and methods for identifying and verifying information provided by the customer are limited. Existing systems generally accept a customer's address without checking it against other data. In addition, voice recognition technology used by VRUs are limited in their ability to identify customer information provided in the customer's speech during the call, such as the customer's address. Further, limited information is provided to the live agent, and therefore the live agent has a limited ability to market additional products and services that may be relevant to the customer. For the solicited offers, the limited information provided to the agent also prevents the agent from following up on prior offers that may have been extended to the customer. Further, the limited information provided to the live agent undermines efficiency because the agent must collect significant information from the caller after the call is routed to the live agent.
These and other drawbacks exist with current systems and methods.